And this--and this was where Million had been spirited off to!
Setting my teeth, and without another glance at the increasingly grave face of my companion, I ran up the two shallow stone steps to the big open front door, and rang the bell. The tinkling of it was quite drowned by the bursts of hysterical merriment that was issuing from the door on the left of us.
"They can't hear us through that Bedlam," was Mr. Jessop's very appropriate comment. "See here, Miss Smith, as it appears to be mostly ladies I shan't be wanted, I guess. Supposing you go easy into the porch and knock on that door while I wait out here on the steps?"
I knocked hard in my desperation. No answer but fresh bursts of laughter, fresh volumes of high-pitched talk. Suddenly I seemed to catch through it a deep-voiced masculine murmur with an intonation that I knew--the caressing Irish inflection of Mr. James Burke.
"What divilment is he up to now, I wonder?" I thought exasperatedly, and my annoyance at the very thought of that man nerved me to knock really peremptorily on the sturdy panels of the door.
"Don't stand knocking there like an idiot, come in," shrieked the highest-pitched of all the parrot voices. Giving myself a mental shake, in I went.
I found myself in a big brown distempered room, with a long white table running down the centre of it. The place seemed full to overflowing with two elements--one, the overpowering smell of dinner, i. e., pork and greens and boiled potatoes, and stout; two, a crowd of girls and women who looked to me absolutely numberless. They were all more or less pretty, these girlish faces. And they were all turned to me with wide-open eyes and parted lips. Out of this sea of faces there appeared to be just two that I recognised as I gazed round. One was the laughing, devil-may-care face of the Honourable Jim, who sat with a long peg glass in front of him, at the bottom of the table.
Ah, yes! At last, at last! After all my anxiety and worry and fretting and search! There she was! I could have kissed the small, animated grey-eyed face of the girl who was sitting next to the Honourable Jim at the table. However she'd come there, I had at least found her.
My long-lost mistress; Miss Million herself!